In my dresser, there used to be a drawer that I never opened. There was no need, I knew exactly what was inside:

There was a stack of burned CD’s that had been free floating in my car. All of the good ones were in a folder that disappeared on the same day. They were all stuck together with a mixture of car fluid and blood, dusted with broken glass. There was a Sex and the City soundtrack case that sat on the top of the stack, in the worst shape, with blood soaked through the entire foldout.

There was a five dollar bill and two ones crusted together with the same mix of blood and car. Whenever I got really poor I always thought about spending them, but it’s just inconsiderate to hand someone bloody money.

There was a splattered two-ended Sharpie that still worked pretty well. Also a stack of “get well soon” cards sent by people who had the misfortune of reading that I was in critical condition in the paper; a cutout that was also in the drawer somewhere. There were two crossword books and a sudoku neatly stacked, untouched, sent by someone who wanted to get my brain working again.

There was a slightly bloody radio face that I unclipped from the wreck, thinking that I could re-attach it to my next car. It was a nice radio. Unfortunately, the face doesn’t work without the actual radio body, which I left behind.

There was a bottle of Vicodin with my name and the date on it, and it was empty. There’s a reason why they cut you off.

There was a bloody library card. I took that and later taped it in my journal next to the tiny bag of staples that were removed from my head injury. Like little bats, they looked.

There was an oversized beach towel with a huge rip in the bottom corner. My mom confiscated that and washed the stain out. I cut off the bottom half and still use it. Waste not.

There was a stack of pictures I took of the car when I went back to sort through what I had left behind two weeks after the crash. You can see trash throughout the car in some of the pictures. I remember rummaging through it all. I wonder what, in my mind, were the requirements for “non-trash.”

Everything I took with me was useless and stained. I remember the look my mom gave me when we got back into the minivan, me with my bag full of bloody shit.

“Lu…do you really need that?”

I clutched the garbage bag to my chest and looked at her intently,

“Absolutely.”

And I did. For two years those things sat in that drawer.

When I cleaned out my car, I did not see a scattering of useless crap; I saw wounded objects from a pivotal moment in my life that needed to come home with me. Whenever I opened the drawer that contained my objectified memories, everything looked as fucked up and bloody as the day it happened.

One day though, when I picked up the two ended Sharpie marker, the blood flaked off of it like dust, leaving nothing behind but a normal, unremarkable pen. The stains of my past began deleting themselves before I was ready to accept it, and that was confusing.

In an attempt to regain control of the situation I took Clorox wipes to everything in the drawer, and threw most of the objects away afterward. Everything but the money; it was the only thing that clung to its dark red stain of significance.

I felt better only for a few days after the cleaning rampage, until I noticed that it wasn’t just the state of the trash in the drawer that I had been preserving since the accident.

Every so often, my own current image in the mirror confuses me. The girl I see has eyes lighter than I remember, and her smile radiates a genuine happiness that I thought was lost. Her hair is short and dark and I stare at it and wonder for a split second why it’s no longer past my shoulders and soaked with red. Why there isn’t blood everywhere like there’s supposed to be. Like I deserve.

To some degree, I felt better keeping that violent memory contained inside those battered objects, shut away in a drawer. In their absence the horror of mortality has manifested itself within my being, free to continually haunt my progress. The cure for which is clearly not found in writing about it, she only digs in deeper…

Luciana, 24